On December 5, 1945, a group of five U.S. Navy bombers left the Naval Air Station at Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. It was a clear day, and the World War II had been over for
months, so no one suspected that anything would go wrong. That is, until all
five planes vanished without a trace.
The disappearance went largely unnoticed until 1962, when writer Allan W. Eckert
resurrected the story, looking for a supernatural explanation for the pilots'
last incoherent messages: "Everything is wrong. We can't be sure of any
direction. Everything looks strange, even the ocean." Even then, the
story didn't take off until 1964, when author Vincent Gaddis connected the missing planes to other mysterious disappearances
in the area he called "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle."
Now, to most people, it wouldn't seem odd that a vast stretch of open ocean
would, over the centuries, be a place for ships to sink and planes to crash,
but Eckert and Gaddis (among many, many others)
aren't "most people." They see the Triangle (whose dimensions can
stretch and contract as needed) as a mystical place where otherworldly forces
transport victims to other dimensions or simply destroy their ships and
planes, despite any conclusive evidence.
Believers in the Bermuda Triangle claim that aliens
or the lost city of Atlantis cause vessels to vanish -- not their sloppy research that
puts ships inside the Triangle when they were never there,
or dismisses poor maintenance in favor of UFO abductions. Nor do they account for the hundreds of vessels that
pass safely through the Triangle's vaguely-defined boundaries every week -- or for the island of Bermuda itself, which hosts thousands of tourists annually who
never experience anything odder than a sunburn.
But Triangle believers don't let things like reality get in their way. Bigfoot, the Masons, the Philadelphia Experiment, UFOs,
the Mayan calendar, the moon landing -- even the conversion to digital television -- are all fodder for conspiracy theorists, for whom a
straight line is never the shortest distance between two points. They find it
far more interesting to leap to conclusions, make wild speculations, and create connections between wildly divergent topics.
Now, we're not saying that there aren't some things that can't be
explained: the Tunguska event, the identity of Jack the Ripper, the continuing popularity of Will Ferrell.
But most of the time, Occam's Razor
applies, and the simplest explanation is the correct one. Planes run out of
fuel and crash; ships hit storms and sink. End of story. There's nothing in
the "Bermuda Triangle" area that's any more unusual than any other
part of the Atlantic.
Of course, considering that at least one map of the Triangle shows the entire
state of Florida within its confines, it might explain certain otherwise inexplicable events.
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